A sweet photo of a bride and her service dog has won the affection of the Internet.
Posted to Reddit on Wednesday, the image shows Valerie Parrott and her yellow lab Bella sharing a moment at the bride's January 9 wedding in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.
According to the bride, Bella alerts her to oncoming panic attacks, anxiety and migraines. And it turns out, the pup was actually performing a service task to ease Parrott's anxiety in the moment the photo was taken.
"She will do things like lick my hands or lean and put her weight on me to get me to focus on her instead of my surroundings," the bride explained to The Huffington Post. "Basically it helps me to take a moment away from whatever is causing the anxiety and keeps me from having a panic attack."
Parrott said that Bella has been a constant in her life for the past two years, and that there was no doubt she would be included in the wedding plans.
The best part of the photo, according to the bride, is how perfectly it captures the bond between a service dog and her handler.
"This bond is so important because it helps us rely on each other every day," she told HuffPost. "It makes it so I can literally put my life in her paws every day and know that we can make it through anything."
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